As you know, WireGuard is a VPN that allows us to securely tunnel both our personal network and surfing. This gives us secure and reliable Internet access from a smartphone or personal computer.

How to install it on a clean server can be found in this article.

In this tutorial, we'll look at how to install WireGuard in a Docker container using Docker Compose.

Let's install Docker.

But first, you need to update the OS packages.

apt update

Install the necessary packages and add a new repository:

apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg-agent software-properties-common

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt key add -

add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"

Update the packages with the new repository:

apt update

Now let's install Docker itself.

apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Let's check the version:

docker --version

Check status:

systemctl status docker

If it did not start, then run:

systemctl start docker

And add to autorun.

systemctl enable docker

Install Docker Compose

For this project, version 1.25 will be enough for us.

curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.25.5/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin /docker-compose

Set permissions to launch.

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Check how Docker-Compose was installed:

docker-compose --version

Add a Linux user to the docker group:

usermod -aG docker $USER

Let's create a *.yaml file for Docker-Compose.

In order to orient in the future in what we have installed, let's create a separate folder for this project in the /opt directory and go to it.

mkdir /opt/wireguard-server && cd /opt/wireguard-serve

You can also use your /home directory to host this and other projects.

Let's use the linuxserver repository to create the docker-compose.yaml file at https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/wireguard

Create a docker-compose.yaml or docker-compose.yml file,

vim docker-compose.yaml

And add the following code to it:

version: "2.1"
services:
  wireguard:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/wireguard:latest
    container_name: wireguard
    cap_add:
      -NET_ADMIN
      - SYS_MODULE
    environment:
      - PUID=0
      - PGID=0
      - TZ=Europe/Amsterdam
      - SERVERURL=auto
      - SERVERPORT=32334
      - PEERS=1
      - PEERDNS=1.1.1.1
      - INTERNAL_SUBNET=10.10.10.0
      - ALLOWEDIPS=0.0.0.0/0
      - LOG_CONFS=true
    volumes:
      - /opt/wireguard-server/config:/config
      - /lib/modules:/lib/modules
    ports:
      - 32334:32334/udp
      - 51280:51280/udp
    sysctls:
      - net.ipv4.conf.all.src_valid_mark=1
    restart: always

Where:

container_name: name of your container;
TZ=: time zone, you can change it to the desired one, but for anonymity it is better to leave Europe/Amsterdam;
SERVERPORT=: random port on which your VPN will work. It will also need to be registered in ports.
PEERS=: number of users. They can be increased to the required amount;
32334:32334/udp 51280:51280/udp - forwarded ports.

Run our script (to do this, you need to be in the directory where our file was created. In this case, it is /opt/wireguard-server/):

docker-compose up -d

We are waiting for the download of images, and deployment.

We check:

docker-compose ps

docker ps

You can also do this with one command in docker:

docker run -d \\
  --name=wireguard \\
  --cap-add=NET_ADMIN \\
  --cap-add=SYS_MODULE \\
  -e PUID=0 \\
  -e PGID=0 \\
  -e TZ=Europe/Amsterdam \\
  -e SERVERURL=auto \\
  -e SERVERPORT=32334 \\
  -e PEERS=1 \\
  -e PEERDNS=1.1.1.1 \\
  -e INTERNAL_SUBNET=10.10.10.0 \\
  -e ALLOWEDIPS=0.0.0.0/0 \\
  -e LOG_CONFS=true \\
  -p 32334:32334/udp \\
  -p 51280:51280/udp \\
  -v /opt/wireguard-server/config:/config \\
  -v /lib/modules:/lib/modules \\
  --sysctl="net.ipv4.conf.all.src_valid_mark=1" \\
  --restart always \\
  lscr.io/linuxserver/wireguard:latest

To generate a QR code for a smartphone:

docker exec -it wireguard /app/show-peer 1

Where:

1 is the first config/user.

Result:

All configuration files and QR codes are located in /opt/wireguard-server/config/peer*

How to create additional users.

To do this, you just need to change the PEERS directive in the docker-compose.yaml file

In order for the changes to be applied, we recreate our container:

docker-compose up -d --force-recreate

Also, for anonymity, disable ping on the host server:

echo "net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_all = 1" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

And apply the changes:

sysctl -p

Happy surfing.

How to Install Wireguard on Docker